Single Sex/Multiple Facets

I think Andy and Brad Plumer are both right in this scuffle over new Department of Ed regs that give schools and districts more leeway to experiment with single-sex education. I'm predisposed to agree with Andy on this, because I believe in giving children and their families more educational choices, and I think the bar for excluding an entire category of choices (such as single-sex schools) ought to be quite high, and that critics of single-sex education haven't met it yet. Andy's also right that there are some single-sex schools (particularly for women) that, far from reaffirming gender stereotypes have an explicit goal of empowering young women, helping them transcend those sterotypes and succeed economically and academically.

But Brad is also right that some single-sex education advocates also call for gender-based educational approaches that rest on deeply flawed arguments. Americans in general, and particularly educators, have been awestruck by recent research advances that allow us to see the structure and functioning of human brains more clearly than ever before. A cottage industry of education writers and professional development consultants has grown up around helping educators apply brain research to their educational practice. Since we're all obsessed with sex, any research findings about gender differences in the brain are guaranteed to garner national headlines and spark debate. And some of these practitioners, such as Leonard Sax and Michael Gurian, specifically focus on issues of gender differences in the brain in relation to education. The examples Brad offers from Louisiana are based on the kind of notions these guys are peddling about gender differences and their impact on learning.

The problem is, a lot of what they are peddling is crap. They are not neuroscientists and often get the research wrong. It's not that there aren't differences between men's and women's brains. But, as this great American Educator article notes, a lot of "brain research" is really still in its infancy and a long way from being able to provide useful applications for educators. This is true of much of the research on gender differences in the brain. Knowing that a certain structure is larger or smaller in the male or female brain doesn't actually tell you that you should teach boys one way and girls another way. Practitioners like Gurian and Sax draw causal connections between identified differences in male and female brains and stereotypical male and female behaviors, even though many of the links in their causal chain are purely conjecture. And they gloss over the fact that variations among males and females are often much greater than average differences between the sexes. Gender-based educational interventions have never been subject to rigorous, scientifically valid evaluations to determine their effectiveness. The problem isn't that "brain-based" approaches to educate males and females differently are sexist (although they may well strike people that way). It's that they're based on misunderstandings, misapplication and gross overreading of research.

Single-sex and gender-based education are actually two very different things that could potentially be connected but need not be. They should be discussed and debated accordingly, not conflated.

Paradise Lost

EduCap announced that its controversial all-expense paid conference in the Caribbean for financial aid officers is cancelled. My guess, though, is that this is not the last we’ll hear about this issue. While lending companies vigorously deny using inducements to gain that coveted status of ‘preferred lender’, economics tells us that thinly veiled efforts like EduCap’s to get on the preferred lender list are likely to increase.

Inside Higher Ed provides a great overview of this issue – the rising tuition, declining grant aid, and increases in loans, especially private loans (the types of loans EduCap gives), which don’t have the protections for borrowers that federal loans do.

What this information tells us is that the stakes are getting higher. There’s more money to be made now than ever before in student lending. Instead of relying on companies to decide what is or is not appropriate, or on financial aid officers to demurely resist any offers of free vacations, we need to establish a system that truly works for and protects students. That system will necessarily include a better definition of the role of financial aid officers and more clearly defined regulations on what lending companies can offer and do to promote their products.

Halloween Tartlets

Via Alexander Russo, this Boulder Weekly columnist bemoans the marketing of "sexy" Halloween costumes to pre-pubescent girls. I admit, I was Cleopatra for Halloween when I was eight or nine, but since this was October in Michigan (which is often accompanied by snow), I wasn't exactly showing any skin. At the risk of sounding like a crotchety old person, I do sometimes get the sense that little girls' clothes are more sexualized today than they were in my fabled youth. It's not just Halloween costumes--Have you seen the "regular" duds in the 4-6x section of your local Target recently? On the other hand, if this guy thinks the picture accompanying his article online portrays an excessively sexual costume, he really does need to get a life.

More Michigan

Over at NCLBlog, AFT Michigan president David Hecker weighs in ony my report on Michigan's charter schools. I'm excited to see this, because there's a real need for more civil and serious dialogue between the charter school community and teachers unions and other more established education groups that often oppose charters. As this report from PPI and the National Charter Schools Research Project points out, there's a lot of misconceptions on both sides, and a lot of talking past each other. Only a commitment to honest dialogue can help address that.

Hecker thinks my report is mostly on the mark, but disagrees with my assertion that Michigan's charter schools overall are outperforming the state's urban districts in which they are located.

He makes a worthwhile point, so let's clarify this a little: On average, Michigan's charter school students perform better on the state's MEAP assessments than do students who attend traditional district schools in the 18 Michigan school districts (mostly, but not all, urban) that have 3 or more charters within their boundaries. But, this average masks enormous variation within both sectors: there are some excellent schools, both charter and traditional district schools, in Michigan's urban districts. But there are also a lot of mediocre and truly abysmal ones, in both sectors, which no child should have to attend. It's been said ad nauseum, but I'll repeat it again: charters are not a type of school, but a governance innovation. Asking whether that governance innovation generates schools that are, on average, better-performing than what was there before is a legitimate question (but not the only question) to ask in evaluating the impacts of this governance innovation as policy. But that question mainly matters to wonky folks like me. What really matters is reducing the number of crappy schools in both sectors--either by improving or closing them--and increasing the number of good ones. The fact that nearly 10 percent of the charters opened in Michigan to date have been closed suggests that, in the charter sector, closing crappy schools sometimes happens. Are there more schools--both charter and traditional district schools--that should be closed? Probably. Should we be doing more to replicate high-performing schools in both sectors? Hell, yes. Hecker and other union leaders could support this process by praising authorizers when they close down low-performing charters, rather than seizing on closures as evidence the charter model is flawed. Closures are a feature, not a bug.

Speaking of authorizers, Hecker is critical of the fact that Michigan's university authorizers receive 3 percent of the per-pupil funding for schools they oversee. But if there's one important lesson we've learned in the charter movement so far, it's that quality authorizing is difficult, requires staff time and resources, and someone's got to pay for it. Funding authorizer operations adequately is a critical state policy step to supporting charter school quality and accountability. Have some authorizers in Michigan and nationally taken advantage of authorizer funding streams to support unrelated operations while doing a crappy job (or basically no job) overseeing schools they charter? Yeah (and a lot of those authorizers have been school districts). But the solution to this is to strengthen the mechanisms through which authorizers are held accountable for the performance of the schools they charter, not to stop financially supporting authorizer operations. Overall, nationally, research shows that universities have done a better job of authorizing than many other authorizers. There's a reason the UFT went to SUNY to get charters for their schools in New York, and not to the NYC schools.

Finally, Hecker's final comment hits on an issue that I've been thinking about a lot lately:

The main point that the report does not make is that the original intent of charters was for them to serve as an incubator of new ideas and approaches, with the successful strategies being incorporated into traditional public schools. The point was not to develop an entirely separate system of public education--one with very limited accountability and that siphons money away from traditional districts. Another important point is that I do not know of anything going on in a Michigan charter that has not been--or can not be done--by a traditional public school.

Yes, fostering innovation is one initial intent of charter schools that appears in many state laws, but it wasn't the only goal. In Michigan, the rationale for chartering had a lot to do with wanting to expand parent choice. I also tend to beleive that having a diversity of educational models available to parents in different schools is a positive social good--whether or not those schools are "innovative"--because there's tremendous diversity among children, and not every kid is going to thrive under the same educational model. As I note in the report, there is a lot of innovation going on in Michigan's charter school sector--but much of it is management and organizational innovation (such as the role of EMOs in the state), which is much more difficult to translate to the public sector than curricular and pedagogical innovations.

And there are clearly some very innovative charters in Michigan. I encourage Hecker to visit Nataki Talibah Schoolhouse of Detroit, or Walden Green Montessori in Spring Lake, or the Chatfield School, in Lapeer. There's no hypothetical reason district schools couldn't do some of the things these excellent schools do. But the reality is that doing what these schools do in the district system can be risky.

The more I learn about chartering, the more I come to appreciate the legal protection a charter contract offers to visionary educators. It's worth remembering that Michigan's charter school movement has its roots in the "empowerment schools" initiative in Detroit in the late 1980s. A reform-minded school board initiated charter-like contracts with schools that gave them greater autonomy and control over their funding in return for accountability. But when an election swept out members of that school board, the agreement fell apart and the empowered schools lost the freedoms they had gained and went back to being normal schools. Autonomy and innovation that depend on the good will of elected school boards and the educational administrators they appoint are inherently precarious. In a place like the District of Columbia, where school boards come and go and there have been seven superintendents in the past 10 years, the legal protections of a charter school contract actually mean some of these schools have more stability than schools within the district system. Charters can offer opportunities for a lot of things teachers want--stability, autonomy, opportunities for innovation. That's part of why the UFT opened its own charter school, and it's why I remain hopeful in the potential for productive dialogue between charter and teachers union leaders.

UPDATE: Leo Casey joins the conversation. I couldn't agree with him more that charter school advocates need to be more outspoken than anyone about supporting good authorizers and getting bad ones out of the business. That's been a major ongoing theme of the series of state and urban charter school reports I helped edit first at PPI and now at Education Sector, and I'm proud to say that some of our work has contributed marginally to helping improve authorizing in some of these states.

How Does Your State Stack Up on Pre-K?

Find out in this new report from Pre-K Now. National picture: 31 states increased their preschool funding by $450 million for FY2007. And don't forget quality.

Wherein Prudery Trumps Cultural Literacy

It's old news, but, if I were an advocate for teacher unionism, I'd be highlighting this incident till the cows come home as an example of why teachers need protection against capricious firings. Is it any wonder our children don't know anything about Ancient Greece, Rome and the roots of Western culture? I mean, what better than the profusion of nekkid statues to get kids interested in these subjects?

More Flex For Single Sex

Spellings announces amended regulations for single-sex education. More flexibility for single sex classes and schools.

My earlier rant on single-sex.

And a recent report out of the UK-based Centre for Education and Employment Research on single-sex. Looks at the issue cross-nationally and worth reading.

Charter Schooling in the Wolverine State

This is the picture that I wanted to have on the cover of Education Sector's new report on charter schooling in Michigan (see, I don't hate boys). Sadly, I was vetoed by people who claim to have taste and didn't want to pay big licensing fees for the image.

So, without Hugh Jackman's mug on the cover, why should you read this report on charter schooling in Michigan? Let me tell you:

For starters, Michigan is a leading charter state. It was one of the earliest states to pass a law and has more students in charter schools than any state except for California and Florida.

Second, Michigan's charter school movement has some unique features that make it particularly interesting. Nearly three-quarters of Michigan's charter schools are run by private, for-profit Educational Management Organizations (EMOs), more than any other state in the country. There are both good and bad sides to this. In addition, most of Michigan's charter schools have been authorized not by the local school districts and state agencies that oversee charters in most states, but by the state's public universities, many of which have been eager to authorize charter schools. Although the public universities had quality problems in their charter oversight early on, they have improved and these independent authorizers are, on average, higher-quality authorizers than many of the authorizers that operate elsewhere in the country.

Third, the political history of charter schooling in Michigan is very interesting, and involves a compelling cast of characters, including former Governor John Engler, a Republican; current Governor Jennifer Granholm, a Democrat; Detroit's Mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick; asphalt magnate-turned-philanthropist Bob Thompson; former Piston Hall of Famer Dave Bing; former Dem gubernatorial candidate-turned charter school founder Doug Ross, and 3,200 protesting Detroit teachers. Who needs the Wire when you've got this bunch?

Finally, and I think this is the most important point, Michigan's experience is a clear example of why the charter school movement must focus on quality. In the mid-1990s Michigan's charter schools grew rapidly and somewhat wildly. While some excellent schools emerged, there were also lots of quality problems, demonstrating that the "if you build it they will come" approach to chartering isn't enough itself to produce a strong supply of quality schools. Since then, the state's charter community and university authorizers have improved quality, but Michigan's charter schools still underperform statewide averages (they are doing better than the urban districts in which most are located, however) and the fallout from early quality problems undermines political support for them.

There's lots more, so read the report!

Via Mike Antonucci, another reason the Michigan report is relevant today.

Big Bird Trumps Baseball

Yes, it is Game 3 of the World Series, but they’re tied 1-1, so no one’s winning tonight anyway. Instead, tune in to Independent Lens on PBS for “The World According to Sesame Street” and spend the evening reconnecting with Bert and Ernie. Check out this post for more information about the movie.

Suffer the Children

UNICEF is trying to improve early childhood development in Iraq. This is obviously very, very difficult.

“Whether it is education, nutrition levels or access to basic services, the continued conflict taking place in Iraq is affecting all aspects of the lives of children,” says UNICEF Iraq Senior Programme Officer Geeta Verma.

I don't mean to dismiss UNICEF's work, but, under the circumstances, it's kind of hard to get excited about universal salt iodization (which helps prevent iodine deficiencies), fortified wheat flour, or professional development for 25 early childhood educators. Regardless of where events in Iraq are headed in the short to mid-term, long-term the nation will have to cope with the fallout from a generation of children traumatized by growing up in a war zone.

Back to Basics?

First it was penmanship. Now it's grammar. Or so sayeth the Post, anyway. I'm holding out for long division, myself.

UPDATE: KDerosa has more on why penmanship matters.

College Rankings Throw-Down

On Wednesday morning from 9:30 to 11:30, you'll be coming to Education Sector's panel discussion on college rankings and higher education accountability, to be held at the Capital Hilton, just two blocks north of the White House. Register here.

What's that you say? Staff meeting that morning? Big project due? No, no, you're not fooling anyone. You and I both know you're coming. It's an all-star cast of movers and shakers. The Secretary of Education's Chief of Staff. The Executive Editor of U.S. News & World Report. The President of Trinity College. Yours truly, and more! All debating which colleges really are the best in the nation and how exactly that determination should be made.

If you're really not going to be there (and between you and me, if you can't wangle your way out of work to get to an event as cool as this, it's time to updating your resume and trolling for job announcement on line. Life is short, friend. Think about it.) the audio will be live Webcast. But seriously, be there.

The Real Problem In Our Schools

Unsupervised chasing.

Yes, I'm Going To College (Unless I Go Pro)

A new NCES report about high school sophomores shows that most of them "plan and expect" to earn a 4-year college degree or higher. The racial breakdown shows this to be true for 77 percent of black students, 87 percent of Asian students, 81 percent of white students, and 73 percent of Latino students. Almost all (93 percent) of high income kids, 79 percent of middle income kids and 66 percent of the lowest income kids say they'll receive at least a bachelor's degree.

These percentages are all big jumps from 1980 and 1990- not so surprising really since we've done a pretty good job advertising that a college education is valuable and ultimately the gateway to the middle class. And since everyone basically believes they are middle-class, it's not surprising that most would probably think they would go to college.

Sadly, we know many of them won't go and many more won't graduate.

Which brings me to my neighbor, who at age fourteen will look you straight in the eye and tell you he plans to be a professional basketball player. This despite the fact that he does not play on his school's basketball team, nor has he (in the four years I've known him) ever participated in a team sport. When I point this out to him, he waves me off and I realize that while one part of him is genuinely planning to go pro there is another part of him that knows he won't. Will he go to college? Yes, he says. But he's taking pre-algebra again and doesn't know what the PSAT is when I ask him. I also ask him what college he plans to go to. He doesn't know and doesn't want to answer. He's not looking at me straight anymore and I think he realizes–now that we're really talking about it–that his options are pretty limited.

My neighbor's no exception. A sociologist at UNC-Charlotte, Roslyn Mickelson, wrote an article back in the 90s about a phenomenon she called the attitude-achievement paradox. Focused on mostly low-income Black students, she found through her research that student attitudes operate on two different levels. These kids know that college is highly valued in society and so express positive attitudes about it. But on another level, the one rooted in their daily lives where college graduation is the exception not the norm, they realize that the path to college is not so clear for them. Ask these kids if college is important and they will convincingly agree. Ask them if they plan to go and they will nod with certainty. Then ask them how they will get from here to there. They may pause, shrug or say they'll figure it out later but they probably won't start describing their course schedules, college application materials, and financial aid options.

All this to say that these kids really don't need us to emphasize how and why college is so important (stay in school! college grads earn more!). They need some concrete knowledge and skills and support to navigate the not-so-obvious and never easy process of getting from where they are to where they "plan and expect" (and deserve) to get.

Village People

“It takes a Village” was the refrain of this morning’s policy breakfast forum held by the D.C. State Education Office on it’s new report, “Double the Numbers for College Success: A Call to Action for the District of Columbia.” In response to the report’s conclusion that 9 out of 100 D.C. students complete college on a traditional timeline, a wide range of ‘villagers’ at the forum stated their commitment to improving college access and attainment for D.C. students.

While it may have confirmed what many on the panel and in the audience already sensed, this report provided the important service of establishing common ground – that 9% college graduation is much too low – for a wide variety of education advocates whose agendas sometimes conflict. Instead of promoting individual agendas, the theme today was collaboration, as a wide range of speakers – parents, university presidents, council members, the mayor and superintendent – emphasized the need for a commitment from everyone in the city.

I don’t want to rain on the village parade with all the encouraging talk of collaboration and commitment (no sarcasm there, it really was encouraging), but I’ve got to push the question – “Double the Numbers” is just a start, right? It will certainly be an achievement, but an 18% college graduation rate can’t be the finish line.

P.S. An interesting element of the report is the wide range in DC students’ graduation rates at various universities. Among the top three universities DC students attend, graduation rates were 9% at UDC, 12% at Howard, and 51% at Trinity University. As the report states, this emphasizes the need to help students understand that not all colleges are created equal when it comes to getting students to graduate, and key to increasing graduation rates is encouraging students to attend institutions that have the most success with low-income and minority students.

Department of Odd Juxtapositions

Both from NYT's ten most e-mailed:

"Preschoolers Grow Older as Parents Seek an Edge"

"Preschool Puberty, and a Search for the Causes"


Hint: Moms and Dads, if you're kid's growing pubic hair, it's probably time to let him/her move on to kindergarten.

Getting on the Little People Bandwagon

The Century Foundation hearts preschool. And they think it should be universal, not targeted.

Stupid and Happy

So, does Brookings' Tom Loveless know how to work the press or what? It's all about the counterintuitive, kids. The latest Brown Center Report on American Education shows that kids in countries with higher average math test scores are less likely to say they enjoy math and are good at it than kids from countries with lower test scores, which is not quite the same as "Happy, Confident Students Do Worse than Math," but, hey, what's it matter. I mean, I was miserable in high school and I did very well in math, so it must be true, right?

It's not surprising the report got most attention for its most counterintutive finding, but I actually think it's a lot less interesting than the report's other sections, which looked at trends on the main and long-term NAEP (scores are up in math, stagnant in reading and science, and high school students are faring worst of all the age groups), and whether or not differences in state performance on NAEP and their own state tests means states are "gaming the system" by lowering their standards, an interesting question relevant to the renewed interest in national standards. Most interesting, IMHO: Loveless suggests that the poor NAEP performance of high schoolers may reflect their tendency to screw around on the test. Teenagers screwing around?!?! Who knew?

Learning on the Brain

Writing in the fall American Educator cognitive psychologist Daniel T. Willingham explains why much of the hype about brain-based learning is just that, and he proceeds to eviscerate several popular "brain science"-based education myths, including the myth that schools are designed for left-brained students, the myth that schools are designed to suit girls' brains, and the myth that classical musical is critical to stimulating young children's brains. Well worth reading.

Gratuitous Edu Catblogging

Joe Williams reports that the NYC Department of Education is cracking down on rats and mice in the city's schools, following a NY Post report that 360 school cafeterias were rife with the vermin. Ewww! Hope none of them are participating in Erin's cook-off. Jelly, pictured here, offers her services to the students of New York.

Spending Limit Silliness

AFTie Ed has been posting extensively on the issue of state Taxpayer's Bill of Rights (TABOR) initiatives. He thinks they're bad for education, and he's absolutely right.

TABOR provisions--often implemented via ballot iniative or constitutional amendment--limit annual state spending growth to a fixed percentage, typically tied to the inflation rate and sometimes a measure of population growth. State spending typically increases at higher rate, usually in line with the overall growth in the economy. If the economy grows by 5%, for example, 1% might be due to population growth, 2% to inflation, and 2% to increases in economic productivity. TABOR provisions essentially deny the public the right to invest the fruits of productivity growth in public services, including schools. Thus, public employees--like teachers--whose work contributes to economic growth don't share in those rewards.

In addition to being simplistic and mechanistic, TABOR provisions are also intensely undemocratic. They amount to the citizens of today denying the citizens of the future the chance to have different opinions about how much public spending is desirable (unless that amount happens to be less than spending today).

Ed's advocacy on this issue also emphasizes a point that sometimes gets lost in the various internecine education policy disputes around unions and collective bargaining: while unions may be wrong on some of the issues within education policy, they're on the right side of many of the most important issues outside of education policy, this being just one example. There are plenty of people out there who couldn't care less about the intracies of seniority-based transfer rules or merit pay, they just want to cut school spending and use the money to fund tax cuts for big corporations and rich people. That those policies should be opposed we can all agree.

Like Oil and Water?

Teachers Unions and Charter Schools--like oil and water, right? A new report from the National Charter School Research Project and the Progressive Policy Institute looks at what happened when the two organizations convened a group of charter and teachers union leaders at PPI. No, the building did not explode. But some common themes did emerge: Different metaphors and frames for viewing education issues mean both sides often find themselves talking past each other, and while leaders of both the charter and labor movements tend to view the other in light of its most extreme members, moderates within both movements actually share a lot of the same goals and views for what good schools should be like. And both movements could gain something of value from one another. It's a preliminary foray, but expect more action around this topic down the road.

The Lemons' Last Dance?

This summer, the Department of Education required states to include Equity Plans with their Highly Qualified Teachers Plans as part of NCLB compliance. Between the NCLB attention and groups like The Education Trust pushing the issue, teacher equity is increasingly becoming a top concern for states.

That’s why this California law, signed by Schwarzenegger on September 28^th, could be a harbinger of things to come. As states move to comply with the teacher equity provision of NCLB, they may look more closely at the impact of teacher transfer and hiring rules, especially if typical strategies like incentives, targeted recruitment, and mentoring are insufficient in addressing the teacher equity problem.

This law underscores the need for high quality and independent research on the "Dancing Lemons" issue - research that examines the real impact of collective bargaining on teacher quality relative to the impact of other important factors, such as working conditions and pay.

School cafeteria bake off!

No, don't run screaming! These ladies are SERIOUS, and it all sounds pretty tasty to me.

Honestly, though, it’s a nice reminder of the dedication of school employees, including the ones you don’t hear about in policy debates.

Why I Love Leo Casey

Read this post, in which Leo both weighs in on the homework debate and critiques Alfie Kohn's broader world view. I don't agree with everything Leo says, but he cuts to the heart of what's wrong with the debate that's often constructed between "rigor" and "authentic learning."

The Great "H" Debate

So, Ryan at Edspresso, Joe Williams, AFTie Michele and NYC Educator are engaged in a lively debate about whether or not public officials who have some responsibility for public education and send their kids to private schools are hypocrites. Several people also wrote to me and Tom about this issue in DC following our Post piece about the problems facing DCPS. I tend to react negatively to these kinds of arguments because I don't think it's fair to kids to use them as a debating props simply because you disagree with their parents.

It is disconcerting, however, when policymakers actively oppose efforts to give disadvantaged families access to better education options that the policymakers already enjoy. Something feels terribly insensitive when the person arguing that children from poor families must be forced to remain in crummy public schools, because allowing them to leave would hurt the public school system, is someone who has no similar compunctions about removing their own children from the same system. But I think Ryan has chosen the wrong thing to focus on here. The issue really isn't whether or not policymakers send their kids to public schools--even if policymakers do choose to send their kids to public schools, this still reflects a choice--a choice that disadvantaged families don't have.

This is also an issue I see playing out on a more personal level because many of my friends are people who work in education policy and care about public schools, but as the ones who live in DC are starting their families, they struggle with the issue of where to send their children to school: should they move to Virginia of Maryland? try to afford a home in one of the DC neighborhoods fortunate enough to be in a "good" school attendance area (and hope the lines don't change too much)? look into private schools? do any charter schools provide good enough options? I know many people who've found ways to craft a good education for their children from charters and options available in DCPS, but it requires effort, savvy, and in some cases a good bit of luck. These decisions have implications that extend beyond education because DC's civic and fiscal health and growth require it to retain stable, professional families. And it's hardly an issue unique to DC.

Finally, I want to disclose that this issue--should people in charge of public schools be required to send their children to those schools?--is one I have a somewhat unique perspective on, because, as readers know, I am the daughter of a public school principal. Because my dad's contracts required him to live in the school districts he worked for, in practice that meant my sister and I had to go to the high school of which my dad was principal. Fortunately for us, it was an excellent school. But it's not always easy having your dad for the principal, even when he's a good and popular principal and you love him a lot. I'm not complaining, but I think it's worth pointing out that sometimes there are good reasons for people who run public schools to choose not to send their kids to the schools they run, because being in a school your mom or dad's in charge of can have its own problems.

Diploma Mills? Or Something Else Altogether?

This month's installment of Education Sector's ever-popular "Charts You Can Trust" series describes the startlingly large number of doctorates in education being handed out by a trio of universities--two based in Florida--that provide most of their services to mid-career educators via distance learning and the Internet. (Thanks to This Week In Education for the link).

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, Fort Lauderdale-based Nova Southeastern University granted 447 doctorates in education in 2005. To put that in perspective,that's three times as many as the university that granted the fourth-largest number of education doctorates, Teachers College at Columbia. It's fives times as many as the number 10 university, the University of Virginia.

It's tempting in discussions like this to start throwing around phrases like "diploma mill." But that would be unfair, primarily because schools of education generally do a terrible job of rating the quality of their programs and graduates in any kind of objective, comparable way. You can get a bad education in a traditional classroom and a good education via non-traditional means. Until established ed schools step up and demonstrate what they're really worth, speculation about quality-for-quantity tradeoffs at places like Nova remain just that: speculation.

That said, it's hard not to wonder what the degrees earned by the legions of new Nova doctors really signify. A friend of mine earned an Ed.D. from a top-ranked Ivy League school last year. It took her seven years--classes, teaching assistantships, lengthy dissertation written under the supervision of a well-respected researcher, the whole nine yards. I imagine her experience was so dissimilar to that of a typical Nova graduate that giving them both a degree with the same name is inaccurate in a fundamental way.

Perhaps that's what's really needed--more differention and variety in degree designation, so that everyone knows the difference between people who completed a classic doctoral program and those who simply completed a lengthy course of study. Without that--or objective, outcomes-based measures of program quality--we're sure to see further commodification of college degrees.

The Wire, Week Five -- Ain't Misbehavin'!

This week The Wire took us inside one of the toughest jobs you could ever have: establishing order and discipline in a middle school classroom. But there’s something making it much tougher in Prez’s case—the dismally low-level classroom assignments he’s asking students to complete and the depressingly low expectations that such assignments embody. (As Stephanie Robinson—one of the nation’s foremost experts on teaching and a principal partner at the Education Trust—often puts it, “The classroom assignments teachers give students are a very accurate proxy for exactly what and how much they expect students to learn.”)

However, as is often true of The Wire, you have to watch very carefully to catch all of this. For viewers with Tivo or some other way to pause the action, take a careful look at the worksheet the camera focuses on for a few seconds. It contains 20 numbers. The directions read, “Move the decimal point two (2) places to the left.” The objective of the worksheet is written at the top: “IDENTIFY THE LEFT DIRECTION.” Knowing how to move decimals is important, but odds are that that these thirteen-year-olds already know their left from their right. Even if Prez has a few who aren’t quite sure, there are better ways to teach it.*

It often seems paradoxical to non-educators, but mindless worksheets like that are actually more likely to cause kids to misbehave in class—and eventually to drop out of school—than challenging assignments. At one point Prez asks Michael why he’s not working on the problems: “Come on, this is easy. I know you can do it.” The look on Michael’s face tells us everything we need to know about the relationship between student behavior and academic expectations: We need to give students something to behave for if we want them to work hard and take school seriously.

* Put your hands in front of your face, palms outward. Point your thumbs at each other. The hand that makes an “L” shape is your left.

-- Guestblogger Craig Jerald

School Safety Summit

What Catherine and Leo said. Seriously, as Alexander Russo points out, recent tragic events notwithstanding, school violence rates are down, and schools are actually among the safer places kids can be. (And while you're there, check out the Colbert Report clips)

He Can't Be Serious

Reeling from recent school shootings, Rep. Frank Lasee of Wisconsin introduces a bold new proposal: Give guns to teachers. "To make our schools safe for our students to learn, all options should be on the table," he said, according to an AP article in today's USA Today. "Israel and Thailand have well-trained teachers carrying weapons and keeping their children safe from harm. It can work in Wisconsin." The article is quick to point out that Thailand and Israel might not be quite the epitome of peace and safety that we're going for in our schools.

NCLB Ratings Week

Jennifer Booher-Jennings' op-ed in today's Washington Post on the unfortunate incentives NCLB gives educators to focus on average students at the expense of the above-average and those who are really struggling may sound familiar to Education Sector and Washington Monthly readers, who were able to read an extended discussion of the problem here a year ago.

NCLB encourages teachers and principals to neglect large swaths of students because the law's drafters decided to judge schools on the basis of whether a sufficient percentage of their students cleared a statewide test score hurdle once a year, rather than on the basis of how much schools educate each student over the course of a school year (which presumabely is what parents and taxpayers want to know). This is in-the-eduweeds stuff, but the point is that the single-score method incentivizes schools to focus on kids who score close to state standards, because such kids are going to be a lot easier to get over the bar than kids who can barely read and write. (In theory, schools will have to focus on these kids by 2014, when NCLB requires 100 percent of students to meet state standards--but loopholes in the law will allow schools to continue to ignore at least some of these kids). Nor are kids who cruise over the bar worth focusing on; schools don't get any credit for raising their scores, even though they represent more than half the kids in many school systems.

I don't like making educators out to be cynics, caring only about the kids who will help them keep their reputations and, ultimately, their jobs. Many teachers obviously care deeply about all their students. But educators are rational people and the logic of NCLB is pretty clear--it's the kids near the bar, those who score near state standards, who are going to provide the biggest returns on tutoring and othe investments, because schools only have to raise their scores slightly to get them over the reading and math bars and thus help educators avoid the consequences of failing to meet NCLB's performance expectations--consequences that ultimately include losing their jobs.

All this matters because NCLB's school-rating system is at the core of the law's effort to raise student achievement. Encouraging schools to help students at the expense of others (including the neediest students) isn't exactly good public policy--or smart politics.

The solution to NCLB's wrong-headed school-rating incentives is to expect schools to increase every student's achievement every school year, a so-called value-added method of rating schools. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings earlier this year allowed North Carolina and Tennessee to begin rating schools this way. If NCLB's reauthorizers are smart, they will ensure that in the near future every other state has the capacity to do the same.

The benefits of a long-term investment

Eduwonk brings up some good points about an op-ed in today’s Washington Post - while “triaging” students might be a reasonable response to making AYP in a single year, there are few rewards in the law for continuing that approach over even a couple of years. Also, states, not just Tennessee and North Carolina, have already taken advantage of flexibility in NCLB to do what the author recommends: reward schools for making progress, even if students don’t cross the proficiency threshold.

Principals and teachers concerned with making AYP have little motivation to ignore students with the lowest test scores. In fact, this is illustrated best in a quote from the op-ed:

“Ana’s got a 25 percent, the teacher said. What’s the point in trying to get her to grade level? It would take two years to get her to pass the test, so there’s really no hope for her. I feel like we might as well focus on the ones there’s hope for.”

What’s the point? Aside from giving Ana a chance to succeed academically, there is still an NCLB “point” in getting her to grade level. If the school invests in Ana in 3rd grade despite her low scores, Ana could be adding to their percent proficient by 5^th grade. The school, or school system, will still be accountable for Ana in 2 years, so I’m confused as to why it is rewarding to ignore Ana. The ultimate goal of 100% proficiency does, after all, mean 100% of students, Ana included.

On another note, several states have already created ‘Index’ systems that reward schools for increasing achievement at all levels. States’ calculations differ, but essentially schools receive an increasing number of points (say, zero for Level 1, 20 for Level 2, 30 for Level 3, etc.) with the maximum number of points given for students scoring at or above proficient. For some states (e.g., New York, Minnesota, Massachusetts) this formula is used to determine which schools meet AYP, for others (e.g., Pennsylvania, South Carolina), this is used for safe harbor. Either way, it rewards schools for growth, without ignoring the ultimate goal of 100% proficiency.

Is NCLB 99% pure? No, and it is important to keep pointing out problems with the incentive system, and potential solutions, but it is also necessary to keep both the short and long-term incentives in mind.

Speak English or Die

Happy Hispanic Heritage Month.

Well, not everyone is celebrating in the same way. I'm assuming these folks in Danbury CT, site of the recent "Danbury 11" protests, are not so keen on it.

Don't worry, Danbury. A recent study by Douglas Massey of the Woodrow Wilson School, along with Rubén Rumbaut and Frank Bean from the University of California-Irvine, concludes that Spanish is not actually winning the language wars. Not even in South Texas or Southern California, where the largest concentrations of Hispanics live.

The study finds that by the third generation only 17 percent of children of Mexican immigrants can speak Spanish fluently. By the fourth generation, it drops to just 5 percent. So it appears that we're not really holding onto our native language much at all. Just as the German immigrants a century ago gradually gave up their native tongue for English too. Despite the half a million elementary school kids who went to bilingual German-English schools at that time and the absence of any English-only legislation, English managed to survive.

Make no mistake. The bilingual education debate is complicated for good reasons. But the benefits of teaching and learning more than just English in our schools are well documented and simply undeniable. Unfortunately, the unfounded fears of people who speak only English, and related conspiracy theories about Atzlan, get in the way of productive solutions.

And certainly put a damper on an otherwise month full of great celebrations.

Note to the Media: Most American Families are not Rich

Po Bronson's essay in the latest issue of Time calls the media to task for hyping the problems of overscheduled, overachieving, hyper-ambitious affluent families while ignoring the very different set of challenges facing the lion's share of American families. It's completely rational for the media to focus on these issues--affluent families are the people who buy their magazines and books. But it doesn't always reflect reality or serve the public interest. This focus also has a negative impact on education policy debates, particularly when you add in the fact that most people in the policy-making class are themselves members of the affluent group. There is a lot of handwringing that kids are being pushed too hard--but the reality is that a lot of children aren't being pushed enough to develop the skills they need to succeed later in life, nor are they getting any access to the kinds of extracurricular opportunities affluent parents worry about "overscheduling" their own kids for.

Alumni News

Education Sector alum Bridget Kelly is now teaching in Honduras and is writing about her experiences at www.the-start-of-something.blogspot.com. Bridget was the editor of the Yale Daily News a couple of years ago and authored our Connecting the Dots report on Teach for America. Check out both her blog (we've added it to the Quick and Ed blog roll) and her TFA report.

Rookies Redux

Michele over at the AFT’s NCLBlog responds to my post on The Wire and rookie teachers by implying that I’m a hypocrite for making a qualifying remark about Teach for America. However, as Eduwonk also points out, Teach for America has submitted its corps members to a sophisticated evaluation by the respected research firm Mathematica Policy Research, Inc., which found that TFA recruits perform significantly better than typical novices and even slightly better than typical experienced teachers. One reason might be that TFA recruits candidates with much stronger academic backgrounds. Another might be that its corps members strongly believe schools can impact learning, rather than blaming kids and families for poor educational outcomes—even citing “teacher quality” as the single biggest cause of the achievement gap. (Those zany young radicals!)

But that does raise an interesting point. Not all new teachers are created equal. Teachers who enter the profession through some routes, programs, or ed schools might be better prepared than their peers or might learn more quickly on the job. If a truly just society would never unthinkingly assign rookie teachers to its most disadvantaged students, a truly rational one would make exceptions for programs or institutions that routinely supply stronger candidates. Not just TFA, either: Some states are experimenting with ed school evaluation schemes that track the success of graduates by measuring how much academic growth their students make in the classroom, and, as Louisiana discovered, some programs produce new teachers who are even more effective than veterans.

Bottom line: We should be talking about this problem more openly and honestly and we should do more to address it, but at the same time the issue is complicated and it’s dangerous to over-generalize. In fact, I suspect The Wire will use Kima’s situation to make the same point in subsequent episodes. She’s smart, persistent, and she takes her job very seriously. Despite her inexperience, she’ll probably make more progress on that case than anybody expects—including the politicians who want it stalled until after the elections.

-- Guestblogger Craig Jerald

Higher Education "Performance"

InsiderHigherEd.com has a story today about a growing trend in college president compensation, whereby pay is linked to "performance." Not a bad idea per se -- I'm certainly among those who think that K-12 teacher pay should be linked to perforamnce. But then the article describes the performance measures being used:

These payments aren’t just bonuses for a good year, but are tied to specific metrics. [A compensation consultant] said he has seen incentives based on increases in the applicant pool or in SAT averages, progress in recruiting faculty talent, growth in endowments, successful completion of a fund raising campaign, and increases in graduation rates.

Another article also notes the reaction at Vanderbilt University to a recent WSJ story$ detailing the large compensation pacakage enjoyed by President E. Gordon Gee:

Gee enjoys immense popularity among students and faculty members at Vanderbilt where he has overseen the successful completion of a $1.25 billion fund-raising campaign two years ahead of schedule, a 50-percent spike in applications and corresponding increase in selectivity, a doubling in research funding, a tripling in financial aid for undergraduates, a 50-percent increase in minority enrollment, and a 100-point increase in average SAT scores. Gee has also personally involved himself in recruiting faculty members — and has helped attract stars, most recently in literary and African-American studies.

As these articles make clear, presidential performance in higher education is primarily defined by success in very specific areas: raising money, attracting a greater number of more academically qualified applicants, and boosting the university's standing in research and academia.

In other words, boosting institutional wealth, fame, and exclusivity. This shouldn't be a surprise--as a recent Education Sector paper notes, these are precisely the elements that drive the influential U.S. News college rankings. The rankings create an incentive structure, and universities respond in a rational way be aligning their resources and priorities accordingly.

What's left out of this equation is any measure of--and thus, focus on--education and learning that occurs in college. Presidents are being payed for higher student SAT scores. What other industry measures performance by what the customer brought with them when they walked in the front door?

The Dedication of Teachers

Sometimes we here at the Quick and the Ed get accused of not giving teachers enough credit for their dedication to their students, hard work, and the excellent results many accomplish. I don't think that's true--it's knowing how hard so many talented teachers work that makes us all the more angry when the system doesn't support them. This is also a personal matter for me: with a dad who's a high school principal and sister and brother-in-law both teachers, I see the incredible sacrifices educators make on a day-to-day basis.

Take my sister, Rachel Kurtz. She teaches high school English in Washington County, Maryland. This year she also volunteered to advise her school's student government. Last week was homecoming week at Rachel's school. Like many American high schools, homecoming week is also "Spirit Week"--there are different themes for each day and students can earn points for their class by dressing up for the themes. Rachel was disappointed by how few students were dressing up for the themes and how little school spirit they showed, so on Thursday she promised the student body that, if they doubled the number of students in each class who dressed up the next day, she would dye her hair blue. The kids did, and so did she. Here, for your viewing pleasure, are the results.

I know some readers may be skeptical of the educational value of Spirit Week. But this is just the most visible reminder I have of the dedication my sister and countless other teachers show their kids in so many ways that contribute to student learning and better life outcomes for those kids.

I am proud of you, Rachel.

The Wire Episode 4 - Reckless with Rookies

Last night we witnessed an obvious outrage—Top brass assigning a rookie homicide detective to a tough case because they want it stalled until after the municipal elections. “We’re pulling a veteran off a pending case and giving it to a rookie so as NOT to make timely progress on said case?” Normally, we learn, the division simply would never think of doing such a thing. “You won’t catch anything as a primary for the first few months,” Kima is told when she shows up to her new job. “Give you time to learn the basics.” The message is clear: Assigning a rookie to do a tough job before she is ready to handle it is a practice so stupid as to be generally unthinkable.

Clearly, the writers are using this plotline to comment on what's happening way over in the education subplot: Where is the same sense of surprise and outrage when rookie educator Prez gets assigned to teach children in West Baltimore—some of the most educationally needy youngsters in our society? In fact, after seeing so many awful “white knight urban teacher” movies, I applaud The Wire’s writers for being relatively honest that, however well-intentioned and hard-working Prez might be, he’s just terrible at his new job. I don’t have the space here, but I would love to see someone list every major teaching blunder Prez has committed in just the past two episodes.

And make no mistake: His students will pay the price in lost learning. Over the past ten years, “value-added research” has revealed that, in general, students assigned to rookie teachers make considerably less academic progress during the course of a full year than do their peers assigned to more experienced educators. Most novice teachers then experience a steep climb in effectiveness over the next 3-5 years. In a few speeches and some writing, I’ve referred to this phenomenon as a “learning tax,” one that pays for a long-term social good—helping new teachers get better—at the cost of lost learning for some kids.

By the way, I’m not attacking Teach for America—research shows that all of this is as true of credentialed teachers with degrees from an education school as for new teachers who enter, like Prez, through alternative routes. As long as most teachers learn on the job, some kids are going to have to be the guinea pigs.

But if we’re really having an honest national conversation about what it will take to close achievement gaps, why is no one asking an obvious question: If it’s unthinkable to assign a rookie homicide detective to a tough case, why is it okay to assign a novice teacher to educate kids who are behind academically and who face significant educational (and social) obstacles to begin with? In fact, some federal data suggest that poor and minority kids get more than their fair share of novice teachers! (Call that a “regressive learning tax,” since those kids can least afford to pay it.) No Child Left Behind (NCLB) required states to measure such inequities and come up with plans to fix them, but most states have all but ignored the requirement. That's a shame, and one reason I cringe when people say the education system already is doing all it possibly can to close the achievement gap; in reality, beyond some tougher pushing and prodding via NCLB's accountability system, we're not even really trying very hard yet!

Sure, it might not be politically feasible to simply outlaw the practice of assigning rookie teachers to low-income and minority kids. But can’t we at least try to do that for our most disadvantaged kids living in very tough neighborhoods like West Baltimore? Or, if that’s not politically feasible, why not at least insist that disadvantaged kids who do get rookie teachers NEVER end up with a novice or weak teacher the following year, since research shows that getting several ineffective teachers in a row deals a crushing blow to long-term academic growth from which very few kids ever recover? But a dirty secret is that urban schools often do the just the opposite, practicing a kind of triage whereby academically stronger students get assigned to stronger teachers as they climb the educational ladder. So the system compounds disadvantage rather than confronting it.

p.s. Episode 4 also provided the solution to the “soft eyes” mystery from Episode 2, and it also turns out to be related to the rookie theme. Bunk tells Kima that soft eyes are the most important thing to have at a murder scene: “You have soft eyes, you can see the whole thing. You have hard eyes, you’re staring at the same tree, missing the forest.” So the “soft eyes” comment the experienced teacher made to Prez in Episode 2 was actually a kind of foreshadowing (or, since the term wasn’t explained until two episodes later, a kind of “retroactive foreshadowing”—who said The Wire is easy?). If Prez had had the soft eyes that seasoned teachers develop, he’d have seen what was happening between the girls in his class, and he could have intervened before the antagonism escalated into physical violence. As any good teacher can tell you, effective classroom management depends on seeing everything happening in the classroom, whether it’s related to your lesson plan or not. “Soft eyes, grasshopper.”

--- Guest blogger Craig Jerald

The Wire Week Four: Social Promotion

Week Four of The Wire brings the issue of social promotion front and center, as Bubbles enrolls his nephew Sherrod in middle school. Having been absent for the previous three years, and having grown up in family conditions that we can only guess at, but currently include living in an abandoned basement with his heroin addict uncle, Sherrod is understandably far behind academically, particularly in math.

But when Bubbles suggests that Sherrod should be put in a class with students at the same level of learning, assistant principal Donnelly basically says no, it's way too disruptive to put older students in a younger class, and we don't have the resources to do anything else for him. He looks like an eighth grader, he's as as old as an eighth grader, so he's an eighth grader, on the way to high school.

Social promotion has been a hot-button political issue in places like New York City, where Mayor Bloomberg and Chancelor Klein implemented policies that prevent students who don't score at a certain level on standardized reading and language tests from being promoted to the 4th grade. They subsequently added another requirement for promotion to the 6th grade, and just today announced that henceforth there will be no more social promotion to the 8th grade.

So would Sherrod be better off in New York than in Baltimore?

Probably. But it depends on more than just what grade level he's assigned. The debate over social promotion often gets framed as "Should we hold underperforming students back a grade, or not?" Opponents of Bloomberg-like policies note that holding students back screws up their self-esteem as well as the dynamics of classrooms full of younger children. Proponents argue that students who already can't handle the work in one grade will be even less likely to succeed in the next. Research is published supporting both camps; you can find one recent study based on Florida data supporting Bloomberg-like policies here.

But the real issue is this: A student who can't read at grade level is like a ball rolling downhill. The longer you let it roll, the faster downhill it goes. The paramount issue is to stop the ball from rolling.

If you can do that by holding students back a grade and giving them the extra help they need to catch up, that's a good idea. If you can do that by promoting them but then giving them the extra help they need to catch up, that's a good idea too. The important thing is giving them the extra help they need, whatever it might cost and whatever it might be. And the even more important thing is doing everything you can to prevent them from getting to that crisis point in the first place.

Socially promoting someone like Sherrod and then simply sticking him in a class taught by an ineffective, poorly-trained rookie teacher like Prez is clearly a terrible thing to do. Putting him in a class full of 5th graders probably wouldn't work much better. He needs a school system that recognizes him as the high-probability educational and social disaster that he is, and takes immediate steps to change his trajectory.

The Bloomberg proposal includes extra time on weekends and during the summer for students, as well as extra money for literacy specialists, guidance counselors, etc., in middle schools. Whether that's enough to help academically at-risk 7th graders I don't know. But it's clear that without an intense focus of attention and resources on students like Sherrod, the results will be grim.

George Will, Wrong Once Again

George Will, to his credit, has a mild interest in education policy, which is more than most nationally prominent columnists can say. The problem is that his columns are nearly always based on a few tired, outdated, and/or foolish ideas about finance and schools. To wit, yesterday's column in the Post, focused on the "65 Percent Solution."

The "solution" is to mandate that all 15,000 school districts nationwide spend at least 65% of their money in a series of federally-mandated accounting categories labelled collectively as "instruction." I won't go into all the many reasons why this is a remarkably bad idea, you can see previous posts and op-eds here, here, and here. Or if you don't believe me, see Jay Greene in the National Review call the idea "horribly wrongheaded" here, or Gerry Bracey's lengthy takedown here.

For those of you who aren't full-time education policy wonks, Jay Greene and Gerry Bracey are about as likely to agree on education policy as Donald Rumsfeld and Cindy Sheehan are to agree on troop deployment in Iraq.

In addition to rehashing previous wrongheaded arguments, Will also casually maligns a federal agency with a well-deserved reputation for objectivity, neutrality, and fairness: the National Center for Education Statistics:

But in July the National Center for Education Statistics, part of the U.S. Education Department, undermined this national effort. A report on expenditures for public elementary and secondary education for the 2003-04 school year contained this finding: "The percentage of current expenditures spent on instruction and instruction-related activities was 66.1 percent in 2003-04 for the nation as a whole" (emphasis added). Seasoned students of government verbiage noted the suspiciously vague phrase "instruction-related activities."

Opacity is a sign of insincerity: Government language becomes opaque as the government's conscience becomes uneasy. When no Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were found, the U.S. government began speaking foggily of finding "weapons of mass destruction-related program activities."

In other words, because the administration whose election he supported made up a bunch of stuff about WMDs, any other federal agency that releases information contradicting his poorly-conceived ideas is similarly suspect.

His complaint also highlights one of the (several) glaring flaws in the "65 percent solution" -- it's an entirely made-up standard. The number has no meaning or relationship to anything, it's just a multiple of five that was somewhat higher than another number with no relationship to anything. That's why it was no suprise when Standard & Poors found no link between the percent of money spent in the categories in question and actual student learning in the classroom.

Will does make one important point, albeit inadvertantly, when he notes that the "65 percent solution" initiative has actually been very successful, with a signficant number of states adopting it and more on the way. Despite the fact that absolutely everyone--left, right, and center--with a shred of knowledge about education hates this idea, politicians are happily adopting it just the same. There's no better evidence of the marginalized state of education policy than this.

Humorless Feminism Alert

Writing for National Review online, Judith Kleinfeld quotes selectively from the transcript of a recent Education Sector debate on the boy crisis to criticize my arguments against the "boy crisis" hype. Here's a quote from Kleinfeld's piece:

The moderator, Ruth Wattenberg, editor of the American Educator, opened the discussion with a statement from a time warp, “I promise no matter how aggressive or disruptive [the two male panelists] get, I will not neglect Sara [the author of a report dismissing the problems of boys].”

Sara Mead testily replied, “I hope I’m not being called on first because you don’t think I can hold my own!”

There you have it. It’s still all about women. It’s still about men oppressing women. They just don’t get it. “Change blindness” — that’s what psychologists call this dangerous cognitive error.

Wow! The NRO crowd must take that "humorless feminist" stereotype seriously. Cuz, even allowing my brilliant comic timing may not be so clear in transcript, it boggles the mind how anyone could see this exchange as anything other than a joke--maybe a relatively lame one, but a joke nonetheless.

Kleinfeld has to seize on this silly exchange because the actual reasons that I argue we should be cautious embracing "boy crisis" hype have nothing to do with "men oppressing women." Rather than falling, boys' achievement has actually increased over time on a host of measures. There are some places where that's not the case, and even where it's rising, boys' achievement isn't rising fast enough or as fast as that of girls. But that doesn't discount the fact that boys are doing better than in the past in many ways.

More significantly, I'm concerned that generalized fears about a boy crisis distract attention from the groups--students with disabilities, poor and minority youngsters of both genders (although the problems facing boys in these groups are more pronounced)--who suffer from much more significant educational gaps. And I'm concerned that a lot of explanations and solutions being peddled for the boy crisis are based on ideological agendas, misinformation, and little hard research--exactly the recipes for goofy educational practices and bad curricula that have been undermining our education system for years. There are perfectly good reasons to be concerned about the impacts of the boy crisis hype and some of its practitioners' recommendations for boys, leave girls out of it for a moment.

Its been fascinating--and disappointing--to me to see how conservatives, who are generally skeptical of conferring victim status, and critical of untested new educational ideas, seem to embrace both so uncritically when the "victims" are boys and the education "innovations" include single sex schools and implementing gender stereotypes in the classroom.

Refunds for a "college" degree?

The New York Times reported today on the closing of Taylor Business Institute, a commercial 2-year business college in New York City. The New York State Education Department ordered the closing of Taylor following a panel report in August who found, among other things, that “In the bulk of its educational activities, the institute operates more as a high school equivalency preparation enterprise than as a college.”

The NY Board of Regents is in the midst of re-writing its regulations for accrediting commercial colleges, a process other states will have to revisit as these institutions continue to grow. This means having to face the difficult task of determining what it means to operate as a “college” in an increasingly diverse arena of institutions, students, and degrees. This is no small matter. Considering the cost (in Taylor’s case, $80,000 - $90,000 per student), it is important that state oversight be able to determine in a timely manner whether an education is sub-par.

State accreditation and monitoring is likely the best method of preventing colleges from selling students a bag of goods, but on a more adventurous note: if the students attending Taylor find that they aren’t qualified to attend another 2-year institution in New York City, should they get a refund?

Kid Lit and thinking about Education

So, when I was trying to think about what books influenced my thinking about education, I had a strange thought. I realized that a substantial share of the books I loved and cherished as a child were about characters who were teachers. My hands-down favorite books as a child were the Anne of Green Gables books by L.M. Montgomery. Anne teaches one-room school in Anne of the Island and a high school principal in Anne of Windy Poplars. Laura in the Little House books also grows up to be a teacher, as does Mable in the Grandma's Attic books, and while Jo Marsh is a writer she and Professor Bhaer run a school for boys in Little Men and Jo's Boys. This isn't surprising: many classic children's books were written at a time when teaching was virtually the only career option available for middle-class women, so as these female characters (two of whom are based on real people) grow up (they all started their series as children), it's natural that they become teachers. Another thing that strikes me is how young these women are when they take on their teaching responsibilities. Laura Ingalls is 15 when she gets her teaching certificate. Anne Shirley and Mabel O'Dell are similarly still teenagers, with the equivalent of a high school diploma (Anne later goes to college and earns a bachelor's degree that allows her to become a principal). And while the schools these women work in aren't today's inner city schools, they do have to deal with some pretty difficult things.

That got me to thinking about whether any similar contemporary books are being written for children and young women now. These books are somewhere between young adult literature and chick lit--they were intended as entertainment for adolescent and early/mid teen girls, the characters are flawed but are also supposed to offer something of a role model, and romantic interests come into play once the characters get to be an age where that makes sense (which in most of these stories is about the same time they start teaching). I don't read a lot of contemporary young adult or chick lit, so I don't know if there's anything comparable. The sense I get of chick lit, at least, is that everybody seems to be a publicist or work for a fashion magazine. So where's our modern Anne Shirley or Laura Ingalls? I'm thinking Alice in Eduland would make a great heroine.

EduMeme

There are three sets of blogs I attempt to read on a regular basis. The biggest group are the ed blogs that I read for work, which you can see in the blogroll to the right. I also read a few select political blogs. Finally, there are a couple of individual blogs I read for my own amusement.

One phenomenon I enjoy on individual blogs are blog memes--basically a set of questions that people answer on their blogs and then pass onto other bloggers they read/admire/like/what have you. For an example, see this post on Matthew Yglesias' blog.

In my time blogging about education and reading education blogs, I've never come across an edublog meme. So I'm going to try to start one, taking a page from the book meme that's popped up lately on some individual blogs I read. Questions below, with my answers.

1. What book has most influenced your thinking about education?

This is a hard one. Virtually all the books listed below (except Robbins) have had some impact on my thinking, particularly Hirsch, Ravitch, and the cursed Emile. It's not so much that any of them caused me to have a particular policy position, but they've impacted what I bring with me when I think about issues in education, the questions I ask and the things I prioritize. My religious beliefs about the need for social justice, which are particularly shaped by the Gospels and the book of Isaiah, also play a role here. There's no earth-shattering moment or revelation for me that changed my thinking, so much as a slow process of building up ideas over time from reading and experience. (I know this is a lame start)

2. What education-related book do you think is way over-hyped?

The Overachievers, by Alexandra Robbins. I'm just tired of books about the terrible, terrible stress and pressure we put on those poor, poor, affluent kids facing the dire(!) possibility they may not get into the Ivy League school of their (parents') dreams. Why do we waste so much time and energy on such a tiny segment of the population?

3. What education-related book do you think a lot more people should pay attention to/read?

Unequal Childhoods, by Annette Lareau. This book is based on sociological research about the different approaches to childrearing and experiences of children in low-income/working class versus affluent/middle-class homes. It's centered around a series of fascinating in-depth case studies of individual children and their families

4. What is an important issue in education that you would like to see a good book written about?

I'd like to see a really good book that explores historical trends in how we think about children and childhood; the legal and social history of thought around the respective rights and responsibilities of parents, the state and kids themselves with regard to making decisions about children's lives; and what that means for how we think about public education and other social services that impact children.

5. What is a book related to education that you wish hadn't been written?

Emile, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It's not an original choice, but I do think Rousseau's ideas are at the root of a line of thought that has had horrible educational results for a lot of youngsters.

6. What are five books you'd recommend to an aspiring educator, education researcher, or education policy person? (Not necessarily the five most important books, just five that are worth reading)

Left Back and/or The Troubled Crusade, by Diane Ravitch. The historical story is very interesting. I don't think you can really know or question current educational systems and practices effectively without first knowing how we got here.
A Hope in the Unseen, by Ron Suskind. Suskind followed Cedric Jennings, a very smart African-American teenager from southeast DC who was determined to go to an elite university. The story tracks both the education Cedric received at DC's Ballou High School and his experiences at Brown. There are a number of good books in this vein, but I recommend this one because it's about DC and Suskind is an excellent journalist and writer.
Emile, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It's been hugely influential, so people should be familiar with it.
The Schools We Need: And Why We Don't Have Them, by E.D. Hirsch. The argument for content and coherent curriculum, with lots of evidence to back that up. Particularly worth reading if you think you disagree with Hirsch.
The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. If you're going to write about or do analysis on the law, it's a smart thing to know what it actually says. A shocking number of people opining in this area don't.

I'm passing this along to my co-bloggers Kevin, Elena, and Erin; Joe Williams; Leo Casey; and Jenny D.

Sexy Tees!!!!!

Frontpage WaPo article today on the dilemmas posed for educators when teenagers show up on campus in tee shirts bearing suggestive slogans.

The article put me in mind of a visit I made a while back with a group of female state legislators to Young Women's Leadership Charter School in Chicago. As we were walking down the hall, a young woman passed us wearing a shirt with the slogan: "Men are Like Chocolate--the Richer, the Better." Every single female state legislator in the group did a double take. We all agreed the shirt was cute--if not necessarily completely in synch with the school's female empowerment goals.

I must admit, I'm a fan of the cheeky tee and have been known to sport one myself on occassion. But I do frequently see young girls in my neighborhood sporting shirts that can only make me think: "Your momma let you out of the house wearing that?!?!?!?" (A twelve year old wearing a t-shirt that says "Jail Bait" is just plain creepy.) I certainly don't envy the school administrator who has to confront this on a day to day basis.

The lines here for educators can certainly be tough. Cracking down on inappropriate tee shirt slogans is among my dad's myriad responsibilities as a principal. From my school days I mostly remember him cracking down on profanity and shirts promoting guns, tobacco, alcohol and illegal drugs--not today's cheeky tees. The most suggestive tee shirts I remember from high school were the old "co-ed naked" which were tame, albeit dopey. A particularly controversial incident arose when the women's cross country team made shirts sporting the slogan "I may be just a pile of dookey, but dookey gets tougher in time." They were not happy when my dad asked them to cover the word "dookey" with duct tape. And I am not making this up.